New Music: Lake Ruth – To Erika

Deep physics and a tragic mass suicide are the unlikely inspirations behind the blissed-out indie melancholia of To Erika.

Featured on Lake Ruth’s new Hawking Radiation album, the track references Erika Ernst, who opted to stay with the Heaven’s Gate cult when her long-term partner left, only for her to die in a mass suicide soon after.

Maybe that is what gives the song its mesmerising mix of optimism and melancholy. Belief that a new and better life awaits beyond the horizon – in this case, death – seems reflected in the buzzy retrofuturism arrangement.

Broadcast-style electronica and vocal harmonies reminiscent of Stereolab bubble over time signatures that feel equally inspired by jazz and kosmische, and it’s possible that variation between repetition and shifting tempos reflects the way that no matter what the song’s protagonist feels, he always ends up at the same, brutal and sad, endpoint.  

Says band member Allison Brice, “We wrote a pair of songs inspired by Erika Ernst, who had been the partner of Heaven’s Gate survivor Frank Lyford. Frank and Erika had joined the cult as a young couple, and although Frank defected, he could not convince Erika to do the same, and she lost her life in the mass suicide of 1997.”

“The voice in this song is that of my imagined Frank Lyford, outside on a clear, winter’s night, looking up at the cosmos and grieving for the loss of his partner, Erika Ernst. He’s wracked with survivor’s guilt, and feels a prisoner of his own conditioning.”

“The album’s cover artwork was inspired by the song’s first verse: ‘I’m looking upward to the sky, in one direction, on the chance that you are – poised in Orion overhead, while I’m here imprisoned on the surface.’”

Children of Time by science fiction author Adrian Tchaikovsky and Paul Klee’s 1920 print Angelus Novus also play a role within the album’s lyrical and sonic tableau, reassuring the listener that more than being ‘just’ an album, it’s a world-building in its own right.

It should be no surprise that the LP has such deep and complex shapes behind the music: Allison Brice was in Eighteenth Day Of May and The Silver Abduction, while Hewson Chen was in The New Lines and Matt Schulz in Holy Fuck.

Hawking Radiation – the album’s title and title track – was written by Hewson Chen, referring to the energy emitted by a black hole after it consumes something. The black hole was a symbol of the cult, who believed those lost to it are not lost forever, but will live on as a memory.

The limited-edition vinyl release of the LP has already sold out, but you can get it in CD and digital formats on Bandcamp. Hawking Radiation can be streamed on Spotify and YouTube Music. For all the latest band news, head to Facebook or Instagram.